To get cloud migration right, IT leaders must run an outside-in approach parallel to an inside-out strategy. Alongside picking up small, quick cloud technology wins across the organisation, the organisation’s infrastructure and core systems and services must also be overhauled. Leaders can turn to the three dimensions of people, process and technology to guide this whole-of-organisation transformation.
Build the right skills and culture
To succeed in cloud adoption, enterprises must look beyond the cloud and first focus on having the right skills and culture to make it work.
The ‘people’ challenge involves culture shift and alignment. Top executives must provide IT teams and business units support to ensure company-wide buy-in and a smooth implementation. With a clear connect between business and IT, cloud instances can be deployed strategically and effectively, according to clear-cut business objectives that have the end-customer in mind.
However, APAC enterprises today are also short of the necessary cloud skills. Organisations need people that can help to operate the new cloud environment seamlessly – handling new business process methodologies or cloud architecture, design and implementation. 55% of organisations in the region are already focusing their efforts on retraining2, but some of the shortfall will have to be made up with outside support – especially in aspects related to advisory, implementation and operation.
Update old processes to welcome the new
The next challenge that leaders need to turn their attention to is the processes that keep the organisation going. Having the right processes in place enables consistent quality and results in areas including security governance, business continuity and change management.
Organisations typically struggle with adapting old organisational processes that are ill-suited to the distributed and agile nature of new cloud infrastructure. Part of Singtel’s work is helping organisations make the leap, using cloud adoption as an opportunity to streamline and automate processes that were often manual, such as the deployment of new services, software, patches and configuration changes.
Even as technology and organisations evolve and restructure, well-architected framework best practices ensure the cloud migration can scale and evolve with our customer’s business needs.
Treat technology as an enabler for transformation
There are a wide variety of cloud configurations to suit different needs and requirements, and the biggest mistake an organisation can make is to go for the wrong cloud partner. IT leaders must consider how the provider’s architecture, standards and services are aligned with the current technical environment, workloads and management preferences.
Once in the cloud, the challenge lies in trying to actually manage and operate the environment. Customers want to know how to create a service catalogue, how to commoditise these elements and homogenise the tool stack across applications, database and security.
Singtel’s ecosystem approach to cloud services meets this challenge head-on. It simplifies purchasing across customers’ workplace, service and IT operations, complete with a billing engine to keep tabs on how cloud services are being consumed. This out-of-the-box service also connects software-defined networking, orchestration and security to accelerate time to value of moving to the cloud – all through a single self-service platform.
